118 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



the present occasion therefore devolves upon me. The occa- 

 sion, although an opening one as regards you, being thus a 

 closing one as regards me, naturally suggests that the subject 

 of my address should be of a retrospective nature ; and so it 

 has usually been considered by my predecessors in this office. 

 The kind of retrospection, however, which of late years has 

 formed the subject of their addresses, has, alas ! almost exclu- 

 sively been the funeral orations of eminent members removed 

 from us by death during the previous year. Year after year 

 death has gone on picking one by one the best (though not 

 always the ripest) fruit from among us. One year it was 

 Edward Forbes ; the next year it was Hugh Miller ; the year 

 after, Dr Fleming ; and it was clear that no President would 

 have well fulfilled his duty who, in his address, had passed 

 over the deaths of such eminent members of our body without 

 a suitable record and eloge. Owing to the importance of these 

 losses, this species of retrospection has necessarily been pre- 

 vented from falling into arrear. And now, when, thanks be 

 to God, we have had a momentary respite, and have passed 

 over another year without having such another limb lopped 

 off, the President of the day can turn to another kind of 

 retrospection, which has fallen into arrear, or, I should rather 

 say, which has never, since the revival of the Society, been 

 begun to be brought up. Not that we have no losses during 

 the past year to deplore, but that those which have been 

 sustained are of members who, however able and regretted by 

 us all, have not occupied that space in the public eye, nor 

 achieved that amount of eminence in science which distin- 

 guished the members whose names I have just mentioned. 

 Thus had I written, gentlemen, when, on entering this room, 

 1 find my congratulations dashed to the ground by the melan- 

 choly intelligence of the death of Professor George Wilson, 

 which has just been communicated to me. Although not now 

 one of our working members, we cannot forget that Professor 

 Wilson was formerly one of our Presidents, and that of late 

 he has been one of the foremost men in our scientific world in 

 Edinburgh. The loss will be felt both as a public and a 

 private one. His genial and amiable disposition endeared 

 him to his friends and acquaintances ; his abilities and attain - 



